New York
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The US commerce conflict with China has a serious sticking level: rare earth minerals.
China increased its restrictions on its rare earth exports Thursday, main US President Donald Trump to threaten financial retaliation and suggest he would cancel a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping throughout an upcoming go to to Asia.
The tussle over rare earths precedes the present administration; China for years has constructed up near-total management of the minerals as a part of its wider industrial policy.
China’s restrictions are additionally seen as a response to Trump’s “reciprocal tariffs” on Chinese items introduced in April. After agreeing on a commerce truce in Geneva, US officers had anticipated China to ease export restrictions on these minerals.
Here’s what you want to find out about rare earths.
What are rare earths, and are they truly ‘rare?’
Rare earths embody 17 metallic parts within the periodic desk made up of scandium, yttrium and the lanthanides.
The title “rare earths” is a little bit of a misnomer, because the supplies are discovered all through the Earth’s crust. They are extra considerable than gold, however they are tough and expensive to extract and course of and are additionally environmentally damaging.
Rare earths are ubiquitous in on a regular basis applied sciences, from smartphones to wind generators to LED lights and flat-screen TVs. They’re essential for batteries in electrical autos, in addition to MRI scanners and most cancers therapies.
Rare earths are additionally important for the US army. They’re utilized in F-35 fighter jets, submarines, lasers, satellites, Tomahawk missiles and extra, in accordance to a 2025 analysis note from CSIS.
Sixty-one % of mined rare earth manufacturing comes from China, in accordance to the International Energy Agency, and the nation controls 92% of the worldwide output within the processing stage.
There are two sorts of rare earths, categorized by their atomic weights: heavy and mild. Heavy rare earths are extra scarce, and the United States doesn’t have the potential to separate rare earths after extraction.
“Until the start of the year, whatever heavy rare earths we did mine in California, we still sent to China for separation,” Gracelin Baskaran, director of the Critical Minerals Security Program on the Center for Strategic and International Studies, advised NCS.
However, the Trump administration’s announcement of sky-high tariffs on China in April derailed this course of. “China has shown a willingness to weaponize” America’s reliance on China for rare earth separation, she mentioned.
The US has one operational rare earth mine in California, in accordance to Baskaran.
Beijing is utilizing rare earths as main leverage within the commerce conflict, and its newest restrictions come as Xi and Trump are scheduled to meet on the APEC summit in South Korea later this month.
In its most up-to-date transfer, China added five rare-earth elements – holmium, erbium, thulium, europium, ytterbium, and associated magnets and supplies – to its current management checklist, requiring export licenses. That makes the full quantity of restricted rare earths to 12. China can even require licenses to export rare earth manufacturing applied sciences in a foreign country.
It’s not the primary time this 12 months that Chinese restrictions on rare earths have angered Trump. In June, Trump mentioned on Truth Social that China violated a trade truce as Beijing stored its export controls on seven rare earth minerals and related merchandise.
The export controls might have a serious affect, because the US is closely reliant on China for rare earths. Between 2020 and 2023, 70% of US imports of rare earth compounds and metals got here from the nation, in accordance to a US Geological Survey report.
But it’s China’s newest restrictions that are seen as a dramatic escalation in Trump’s commerce conflict between the world’s two greatest financial powers.
“Dependent on what China says about the hostile ‘order’ that they have just put out, I will be forced, as President of the United States of America, to financially counter their move,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Friday.
“For every Element that they have been able to monopolize, we have two,” he added.
NCS’s Nectar Gan, John Liu, Donald Judd, Kylie Atwood, Phil Mattingly and David Goldman contributed to this report.